But only a disdainful pinprick! Surfs first South African winter in fourteen years…
In the second of a series of five-minute films, the South African superstar Jordy Smith, who turns thirty-four at his next birthday, reveals how he and his wife extracted themselves from America just as that country was starting to reek with COVID; a fundamentally grim place to be for a boy and his girl from Cape Town.
A flight to Johannesburg followed by two weeks in a hotel room that had a way of extracting his vitality, like clotting blood; this little airless box soon filled with a combined odour of clam shells, salt marshes and sicking brews, much like an unwashed corpse.
But enough with the niceties!
A thirteen-hour drive and Jordy is home in Cape Town, bobbing like a cork in as good waves as you’ll anywhere in the world.
“In the South African winter you don’t want to be anywhere else but right there,” he says.
Next episode: Watch Jordan play with danger at Jeffreys Bay!